WoW – More fun together!

Jumping to their death

This morning Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn posted about The Importance of Jumping Revealed. Since it relates to my series on situational awareness I wanted to talk about the tactical utility of jumping. First let me say I love jumping too. I played a few MMOs before WOW and none of them had jumping in them. It is amazing how much that little thing makes a world feel more real. Jumping and swimming were the things a lot of games before WOW did not have. Those two things make the world feel more like a world and less like a cage.

But on to tactical jumping.

This is Bob. He insulted the mother of these raptors. Now He is running like heck.

Some of you might think he has two choices, keep running or stop, turn and attack.

Oh now Bob is stopping to attack…

Can he get the shot off?

Oh! Too late!

This is Fred. He accidently stepped on a raptor egg.

Fred knows there is a third choice.

Ah jumping. We love jumping.

Oh wait what is this? Fred is spinning in the air! See the wonderful thing about WOW jumping is that physics is respected and your linear momentum is retained despite changes in angular velocity. HUh? I mean you keep moving in the same direction even if you turn while jumping. Oh!

Hey, Fred can shoot while jumping. Nice.

Now look, Fred did another 180 degree spin before he landed!

This means that Fred lost NO speed while running from the raptors but was still able to fight back!

Oh hey, see how I worked in the ability to spin EXACTLY 180 degrees in one try at any time? Yeah, just like I talked about in the situational awareness practice. Clean fast mouse control has more uses than just looking around.

This trick does not just work for hunters. Warriors can spin and ‘hamstring’ if they targets are close.. Rogues can do it and used one of their many stuns. Mages can even jump, spin, and ‘cone of cold’ things. Almost anything that is an instant cast can be used while moving. Anything that can be used while moving can be used with a jump-spin to attack behind you while moving forward at full speed. And it does not have to be something chasing you. Anytime you want to attack one way while moving at full speed another way you can use this trick.

Funnily enough I put this to good use on a Pit of Saron this week, when my mage was the pursuit target. I was able to keep missile barrage-ing and fire blast-ing as I ran away, and even arcane blast-ing in combination with the instant cast cooldown.